


A blade and a slave

by Faber



Category: The Night's Dawn Trilogy
Genre: Explicit Language, Gen, Non-Sexual Slavery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-10
Updated: 2016-06-10
Packaged: 2018-07-14 05:43:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7155935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Faber/pseuds/Faber
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A LDC Officer and an Ivet talk in a jungle on Lalonde.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A blade and a slave

**Author's Note:**

> Set just before the trilogy with non-canon characters.
> 
> If you haven't read the books there are terms you may not understand.

 “Fucking _goddamn_ useless piece of crusty whore shit!”

 “Shawn just give it to me. No wonder it isn’t working, the processor keeps datavising a battery warning”

 “I changed it a few days ago. This is stupid, what was wrong with a manual fission blade?”

 “LDC wanted to repay Kulu for their investment in the colony. So from now on we exclusively use their latest electronics. I guess we pretty much swapped Earth’s overcrowding, taxes and poverty to get a new political master in the Kulu Kingdom”

 “Look Pete I don’t have neural nanonics. I think we’re both tired of me having to ask you to turn it off and on every time I use it. Can’t we just get one with a button thingy instead?”

 “You mean an actuator?”

 “Yeah”

 “Well I suppose I could pick one up in Durringham from Colonist Supply but don’t let the supervisor find out that we don’t appreciate Kulu’s _totally selfless_ assistance”

 “Fine”

 Peter Markham had been with the Lalonde Development Corporation since it was founded. For thirty years he had enjoyed the frontier atmosphere on Lalonde; although preferred his Spartan ezystak paneled flat in Durringham to a log cabin, he couldn’t sleep in the atrociously humid summer without air conditioning. There were things about Lalonde he didn’t like, mostly centered on the colonists themselves.

 Their activities – including sayce fighting and using Ivets - were something he disapproved of and Ivets saw him as the personification of the colonists; pampered middle class morons who came to Lalonde voluntarily with dreams of paradise. It was the _voluntarily_ bit that made them smile, the Ivets themselves had no choice. They were Involuntary Transportees; criminals from Earth, shipped out to new colonies to serve as a free labor force – temporary slaves until they had worked off their sentence.

 Shawn was one such Ivet, attached not to a new settlement as was normal but as a manual laborer to assist survey teams seeking natural resources. Mostly native flora and fauna, which is why a LDC biologist – Peter – was assigned leadership of so many of these expeditions. Today their quarry was some kind of ‘golden monkey-like amphibian’, if the colonist eyewitness reports were to be believed.

 Shawn put the blade back in the leather satchel, “Why would a fission blade even _need_ a processor?”

 Peter was stumped but managed not to show it, using his neural nanonics he overrode a twitch that was about to appear on his face. He realized he knew little about the new equipment, except for the political reasons they had it. Pete summoned his best I-know-what-I’m-talking-about demeanor and lied, “It’s to regulate the power during the inconsistent strain of cutting through organic material, a manual blade can’t do that”

 “Huh” Shawn pulled a pump action shotgun out of the satchel, “I suppose this will have to do then”

 It might be considered remarkable that an Ivet could be allowed to use a firearm but Peter was pretty sure that Shawn wouldn’t just shoot him. They were 160 miles from the nearest settlement. Shawn had only arrived on Lalonde a year ago and had little knowledge of how to survive in the wilderness. He, like everyone on Earth, had been an arcology dweller who hadn’t even seen a tree until he was shipped to Lalonde like a cow to the slaughter.

 Shawn Schaeffer was from a poor district of Toronto arcology and almost certainly would have spent the rest of his life under that dome if he hadn’t started selling illegal stim programs. Because his crime was minor and non-violent it was considered acceptable to assign him to LDC operations instead of being sent to some shitty wooden settlement on a riverbank somewhere.

 Something occurred to Shawn, “You think that’s why the colonies use Ivets instead of mechanoids?”

 Peter was clueless, “What are you talking about?”

 “Those blades are used instead of ones that would be better suited and Humans are used to do work better suited to machines or animals. Isn’t that the same problem? Or at least the same cause, political convenience trumping Human convenience?”

 Pete paused and looked at Shawn, slightly surprised. He’d worked with the Ivet for eight months and in that time he’d never shown any inclination to talk about politics. Looked like it wasn’t just the equipment he knew little about.

 “I… hadn’t thought about it like that”

 “Huh”

**Author's Note:**

> Absolutely criminal that there's so little Night's Dawn fan fiction. If you're a sci-fi fan I highly recommend reading the trilogy.
> 
> Special Thanks to Shannon for beta.


End file.
